Well, there's only 3 teams with 3 superstars if you consider Kyrie and Love superstars which i don't. In T-Mac's league, he would have been on 2 superstar teams with the Raptors(he was too young), Magic(Grant Hill injury), Rockets(Yao and himself always hurt). I think T-Mac just had plain bad luck.
Many fans like the ball movement and 3pt game, but you know things are out of whack when Kevin Love is shooting more 3pt shots than 2pters. It's also nuts that the premier young big man in the league (Davis) has to become a 3pt shooter to stay relevant. A lot of it comes from the no hand-checking rules. It just makes no sense that as soon as a player turns his back to the basket you can beat the crap out of him, but when he faces up then breathing on him is a foul.
I don't disagree with you that watching great post play isn't boring, but that's about all the '90s had (outside of Jordan) and that's a handful of guys. And even then, while you can appreciate the artistry, it made for slow, floor-pounding games. Jordan in the post = great. Mark Jackson butt-driving defenders = ugh. And that part of the game isn't gone; while centers aren't post brutes or magicians anymore, the perimeter post game is still alive. Kawhi Leonard, Kevin Durant, LeBron James, Shaun Livingston, etc, take their turns in the post. It's a more shape-shifting game, where any position could be the post and any position could be on the receiving end of a kick-out to shoot the ball. And the next possession, the players doing each could reverse roles. Leonard might be posting and kicking to Boris Diaw at one point and Diaw could be posting and kicking to Leonard at another point. That kind of swirling, protean action I think makes the game diverse and consistently interesting.
I guess the league is rely on team ball more than ever now, and of course some people like Tmac would like to think less hero ball = less talent.
The 2000's were also a low point for failed center prospects (lets get the rawest athlete from wherever and make him our rim protector), undervaluing defense (i.e. considering Michael Redd a max guy), and - as you pointed out - giving tons of money to kids out of high school who end up being complete busts (Sebastian Telfair). It was an awful, awful era.
I'm watching basketball since the Moses Malone era, and this season was surely the most mediocre I've ever seen. So yes, T-Mac is 100% right
Even more mediocre than the Moses Malone Malone era when the league was on life support and the 1981 NBA finals were on tape delay after the 10pm news?
Yep - late 70's/early 80's was another low point for the NBA, with rapid expansion in the 70's diluting talent and major drug issues. Players were traded for cash so franchises could stay afloat. The league was a joke.
<blockquote class="twitter-tweet" data-lang="en"><p lang="en" dir="ltr">Olden Polynice on Tracy McGrady remark: "if u had worked as hard as this kid is u would have been a Hall of Famer." <a href="https://t.co/4ZAKeN1eUl">https://t.co/4ZAKeN1eUl</a></p>— Diamond Leung (@diamond83) <a href="https://twitter.com/diamond83/status/730930113991184384">May 13, 2016</a></blockquote> <script async src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>
T-Mac needs to go back to pitching for the Skeeters. My McGrady Skeeters jersey shirt just looks ridiculous now.
Difference between Steph Curry and T-Mac is that when somebody orders a Heineken at a GS game, they get a damn Heineken.
LOL Tmac is falling down into the old rabbit hole of "it was better back in my day" that old guys always say, if you asked MJ or Barkley I'm sure they'd say the league in Tmac's time was also watered down compared to theirs. How can the league be "watered down" if there are only the same 30 teams but NBA is more popular now and they have better global competition which they didn't have before? Disregarding the better players available now all over the world just the advances in technology, tactics and training automatically makes the average NBA player now better than the average player during Tmac's time. Its just like the economy of today, its way harder to achieve the "American dream" now than before because there's a lot more competition around. Maybe what Tmac means is that media before was just focused on a few stars which tend to glorify them and make them legends like what happened to MJ. Nowadays since technology allows us to follow so many players the media presence isn't as concentrated on one guy, before a player like LBJ would've been the center of the league and his rivalry with KD would've dominated news every single year. Now the spotlight is everywhere in a year when you have GSW breaking the win record you also have subplots with Spurs and Cavs assembling good teams and coaches getting fired left and right etc.
He really should mean the league has not enough Marquee players. But role players are ever more maximized in utility, hence teams today would probably have a winning record against teams of those years. Particularly looking at the weak east (NJ nets multi finalists). Moreover, guys that time couldn't score! They had to change the rules to help them score! And not because of strong D, defense is better today imo.
yep the league is dying because steven curry. he single handedly ruined the nba. he will go down in history as the clown who made the nba a clown league
There are role players being paid like superstars too. It gets worse every year especially the off seasons when there is a big increase in the cap.
